Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?

...Life is nothing but trading smells.

If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.

It is only after you have come to know the surface of things ... that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.

I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!

The close-up has no equivalent in a narrative fashioned of words. Literature is totally lacking in any working method to enable it to isolate a single vastly enlarged detail in which one face comes forward to underline a state of mind or stress the importance of a single detail in comparison with the rest. As a narrative device, the ability to vary the distance between the camera and the object may be a small thing indeed, but it makes for a notable difference between cinema and oral or written narrative, in which the distance between language and image is always the same.